31 March 2016

We are the bullies of the earth: strong, foul, coarse, greedy, careless, indifferent to others, laying waste as we proceed, leaving wounds, welts, lesions, suppurations on the earth body, increasingly engulfed by our own ordure and, finally, abysmally ignorant of the way the world works, crowing our superiority over all life.

30 March 2016

There was a time when the government paid people to plant trees. In response to the Dust Bowl, FDR created the Prairie States Forestry (Shelterbelt) Project, 1935-1942, which used the CCC and WPA to plant windrows and forests. This was an attempt to plant 220 million trees on private lands across the great plains. The map below shows the scale of the efforts.

Today's Common Lecture by Sara Karle looks back at the project and traces its current remnants.

Implementing the idea was not as easy as it might have seemed. The science behind the ideas evolved with the project, establishing the idea but gradually improving the understanding of what should be planted and where. Congress designated $1,000,000 annually for labor and the rest was handled through cooperative agreements.

Of the first 6 million trees, 4 million were cottonwoods because they were seen as fast growing. This was disaster relief and needed to be quick.

UCGIS has two webinars remaining in our 2015-16
season, including a new one just recently added. Attending a UCGIS
webinar is always free of charge for those affiliated with our member institutions, and anyone else can participate for a $20 fee.

Religion and planning can be an interesting combination. Despite protections under the federalReligious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), many houses of worship find planning boards to be less than welcoming. The flip side is that many planning boards see applications that think that their religious status exempts them from any legal restrictions.

The Home News and Tribune writes that Hillsborough Township is currently caught up in multiple cases involving zoning of potential sites for religious institutions and their houses of worship.

The NY Times reports on Bernards Township being sued over the zoning change for an Islamic mosque. They say that there were 39 public hearings and lots of demands by public officials. The applicant, the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge, has as its president former Basking Ridge mayor Ali Chaudry, sothis isn't an outside group unfamiliar with the terrain.

The article suggests that some opponents dropped the land use concerns and opposed the mosque openly because of the religion's ties to Islamic Shariah law.

The planning board says it looked only at basic land use issues. But NJ.com writes about the lawsuit saying that it "also reports in detail how other churches and synagogues in the township met no resistance during their development applications." Based on the level of emotion in the responses online, I doubt that this is the last case we will see like this in our area.

10 March 2016

Pondering the impacts of the Anthropocene is difficult. It is hard to visualize what over 7 billion people look like or increasing species extinction looks like. Esri has developed an Anthropocene story map that helps tell the story of this period and looks at the kinds of steps we can take.

The Star is questioning the quality of that EIS and the impacts it describes. Any impact will be major. But some of it is historic: "PolyMet’s proposal, if permitted, would be the largest single destruction of wetlands in modern Minnesota history."

A group of European designers have proposed a new approach to Pre-K education. Their proposal explores the potential for urban farms to serve as preschools. The idea of garden education is growing in lots of quarters. Atlanta has its Patchwork City Farms where middle school students learn about natural processes. But will these students treat the Earth any better than past generations that grew up on farms?

02 March 2016

Mother Nature Network posted an article today about 11 nationally protected wetlands you should know about. It asks, "Did you know that the world's most biologically diverse ecosystems also happen to be some of the most fragile and endangered?" But I trust that our students knew that.

Okefenokee might not be a surprise, but Death Valley will be unexpected for many. In any case, some pleasant wetlands photos without as much talk about the storm protection and shoreline protection that wetlands often provide.

The nation's oldest ongoing civil lawsuit is a case about a water station at the edge of Camp Pendlteon that began in 1951. It is so old that it originally involved Frank Capra. And it is further proof that the case study in The Living Landscape is founded on serious concerns that the neighbors impact the ecology and security of the base.

About the Author

An Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture in Rutgers’ School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. He also serves as Associate Director of the Grant F. Walton Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis and Undergradaute Program Director for Environmental Planning and Design. As a graduate of Kentucky (BSLA), LSU (MLA) and Wisconsin (PhD), he has a passion for the critical role of state universities as a source for world-class research and education based on inquiry arousal but is too busy keeping up this award-winning blog. Dr. Tulloch can be reached at dtulloch[at]crssa.rutgers.edu

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